Sumolabs

Friendfeed, is awesome. In a nutshell, in enables you to produce a feed of all your activity online from various disparate systems. Moreover, you can aggregate the activity feeds of all of your friends, or special feeds in 'rooms'.

It's a Facebook activity stream on crack.

For example, check out my feed that is pulling information from my blogs, delicious, LibraryThing, twitter, Google Talk amongst many others.

But how can the business world capitalize on activity feed technologies?

Why should you care?

Activity feeds are going to be a key technology going forward for managing employees, because they enable management to monitor people based on results and actions, rather than time. It could be one of the missing pieces to make results oriented work environments more marketable.

Furthermore, activity feeds let employees to collaborate with each other without interfering each other, and to have one central channel for all collaborative efforts. We all know about the high cost of interruptions for knowledge workers, and the business world should be moving to pragmatically eliminate those interruptions through technology and change of management style.

Small businesses

Regarding small businesses - some would argue that they couldsimply use friendfeed rooms as an activity feed solution.

However, I don't think small businesses use enough systems that could plug-in to FriendFeed yet (Although FriendFeed can aggregate any RSS feed, so theoretically it could aggregate from anything that offers an RSS feed)

Medium sized businesses and the enterprise

For an activity feed application, the enterprise is going to demand security, scalability, easy of use, and ownership (Software as a service [SaaS] may not be possible here since there are regulatory and data export/import laws in place that could require tight controls).

Activity information will be aggregated from FAR more complex landscape of IT systems such as ERP, HR, wikis, blogs, project servers, exchange server, finance systems, travel booking systems, ad infinitim. There is no limit on what couldn't be plugged into an activity feed.

Identity (i.e. login) would need to be managed centrally via ActiveDirectory or some other means.

There needs to be the ability to form 'projects', or 'project teams', which aggregate activity feeds for a select group of people (similar to FriendFeed rooms).

Therefore, there is a product waiting to be created here. This is a big problem space, with many hard technical problems to overcome in order to make the product stupid easy.

Imagine having an activity feed of the entire team you are working with, or the entire team you are managing. You no longer need to see if someone has sent you 'that document', because you can pull the document automatically when they upload it to Sharepoint, Box.net, a wiki, etc.

Why this won't fail

Unlike other systems like wikis and blogs, an activity feeds pulls information from interactions that the user is already doing anyway and therefore requires no additional effort on their part. Getting people to actually use blogs and wikis has been a problem for many enterprise organisations, because you need to provide them with an incentive.

The activity feed will show if they schedule a meeting through Outlook, if they have changed something in SharePoint, if they have submitted a time expense form late, if they have checked in some code into a versioning system, WHATEVER.

The activity feed is updated based on their actions.

People will dig it

For management, activity feeds these means knowing what everyone is doing at any time based on ACTIONS. There is no longer any need to restrict non-productive applications or firewalling eBay. At the end of the day, you can tell if they were productive or not , by looking at their actions. Who cares if they bought a teddy bear for their daughter online, if they clearly did X, Y, Z that day?

For knowledge workers, it will mean less communication is needed. Why is Bob phoning you for that status report spreadsheet when he clearly can see that you uploaded it moments ago to the project site?

Furthermore, it could enable a transformation of the way performance for employees are assessed.

"Yes, Jimmy works 12 hour days...... But look at Carl's activity feed -- he works half that amount of hours, but produces twice as much"

Fire Jimmy. Keep Carl.

To conclude

We need a 'FriendFeed' type product for the enterprise.

FriendFeed isn't going to be the solution, and it won't be in the future. It is focusing on the consumer market.

Who will focus on the Enterprise market?